The Mural Is Not Just About the Players. Hatziel Flores Made Sure of That.
A graffiti artist from Dallas and Mexico City painted a mural in Deep Ellum about fútbol, community, and the people who never make it onto the field. He called it “Night of Celebration”. It belongs to the city now.
Hatziel Flores is standing in front of a wall in Deep Ellum. The neighborhood has muscle cars running up and down the street on weekends and the particular energy of a place that taught a generation of Dallas artists what they were capable of. He has been painting murals here since he was young enough that the neighborhood felt like the whole world. He is explaining what the mural he just finished is about, and he keeps saying the same thing in different ways, and all of them are the same idea: it is not just about the players.
“I wanted to put myself in that situation,” he says. “And hopefully put those people in. The fans understand. They see themselves. And I think that’s what I wanted to showcase to the people.”
The mural is called Night of Celebration. Flores painted it in collaboration with Gulf States Toyota on a wall in Deep Ellum, Dallas, ahead of the summer when the biggest soccer tournament on earth comes to the stadium twenty miles north of where he is standing, just feet away from the fan zone. There is a figure in it that is not a player. It is a fan. It is, depending on how you read it, anyone who has ever sat in a stadium and felt the specific joy of being present for something larger than themselves.
Flores grew up between Dallas and Mexico City. He has been making art in the streets since before it was respectable to call it that. He is, in his own words, a graffiti artist, illustrator, muralist, and traditional painter. The order matters. The street came first.
WHERE THE STYLE CAME FROM
Hatziel Flores and the Deep Ellum Education
Deep Ellum is where the graffiti started in Dallas. Flores says this as a fact, not a boast. The neighborhood has been a Mecca for street artists since the 1990s, a place that let artists develop their work before the rest of the city was paying attention, and whose tolerance for that experimentation meant that styles could form and grow that would not have survived anywhere else. Flores’s style formed there.
“The mural’s style was developed in Deep Elm,” he says, using the local nickname for the neighborhood. “It was because Deep Ellum required a specific type of thing that they were looking for and allowed, due to the circumstances, put this specific style together. And then it just kind of got a life of its own and became its own thing. Technically it was developed in Deep Elm, and now I’ve done (similar) murals in other places of the world. But it started there. That’s what makes it so special.”
He grew up in Mexico City first. “Football” there was not called soccer. It was called fútbol, which is the correct name for it, as he explains with the patience of someone who has had this conversation many times. When he arrived in Dallas, the word “football” already belonged to something else entirely, and it took a long time before the language settled into place. That duality lives in the mural. You can feel it in the earthy skin tones he chose for the palette, in the way the crowd in the painting is not one thing but many things, in the confetti that falls on everyone equally.
“The game doesn’t just live in the stadiums. It lives in the streets. And it belongs to all of us.”
Hatziel Flores · Deep Ellum, Dallas
The Mural: What Night of Celebration Is Actually About
The brainstorming for the mural started, as it always does for Flores, with homework. He builds mood boards, dives into photographs of players and fans and stadium moments, saves images, looks for the emotional anchor that will hold the whole thing together. What he kept coming back to was not the athletes. It was the people watching them.
“My perspective is from the expectation,” he says. “I’m not a soccer player. I’m an artist. And I was like, how would it feel to be in front of the stadium just watching these incredible moments where they score a goal and how difficult that is. I wanted to put myself in that situation.”
The result is a mural that someone described during the interview as being about the 11th man. Flores stops when he hears it. “Absolutely,” he says. “The 11th man. Yes. It’s one of those things that I wanted to make sure everybody was included. It’s really important.”
The figure in the mural is caught in the moment after something has happened. The confetti is in the air. The evening light is settling over everything. Flores chose the night specifically because of what it represents: the end of a long day of competition, the moment when the tension releases into something else, the specific quality of a victory felt collectively in an open space under a darkening sky. “I love the evening,” he says. ” It’s the type of moment where it starts getting dark and you’re just feeling the area. I wanted to capture that moment.”
The colors were chosen to represent skin tones and diversity. “A lot of earthy tones,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that it was those things, because a lot of times I only have one frame. Movies have 24 frames, 12 frames. Music has minutes. I only have one frame, and sometimes I want to say a lot.” He believes he captured it. He is not certain. He is never certain. The mural belongs to the city now, and the city will decide.
“I only have one frame. And sometimes I want to say a lot.”
Hatziel Flores · Night of Celebration
——— THE PROCESS ———
FROM SKETCH TO STREET
How Hatziel Flores Builds a Mural
The sketch came first. Flores pulls it out during the interview and holds it up: a drawing that contains the bones of what is now on the wall, the figures and the confetti and the evening light translated into the rough language of a preliminary image. The sketch is not the plan. It is the conversation between the artist and the wall that will eventually happen.
“I lay out the wall, make sure that it’s the proper thing as far as sizes and everything,” he explains. “Then the sketch comes in. I lay out most of the lines, photograph it, contrast it to the original sketch, tweak things. Once that’s done, I start color blocking. Just fill everything in as much as I can and spend a whole day doing that. Then I come back, sometimes right away, sometimes a week later, and start working on all the details. The devil is in the details. That takes forever.”
He talks about the math involved. He uses measurements constantly. He calculates proportions and distances and relationships between elements that the finished mural makes look effortless. He mentions that people who say you never use high school math after graduation are lying. He has been doing this for a long time. The execution is the easy part, he says. The interview is the hard part.
The collaboration with Gulf States Toyota gave him something that not every commission provides: freedom. “They gave me almost complete freedom,” he says. “And that’s a huge statement to the company. A lot of the time, artists have to lower our standards because we want to meet the specific things they’re looking for. But they were like: this is what we believe in, we trust you as an artist, we love your work. And that obviously feels great as an artist.” He pauses. “They’re very reliable. I wanted to make sure I was just as reliable as they are.”
When the mural was finished, he stepped back. There was a moment. There is always a moment.
“You kind of impress yourself,” he says, trying the phrase out carefully, as if he is not sure he is allowed to use it. “You didn’t think you were capable of doing something of that quality. And it does humble me a little bit. Because I’m happy that I was able to do this. But also yeah.” He leaves it there.
Night of Celebration is on a wall in Deep Ellum. The neighborhood with the muscle cars and the galleries and the graffiti tradition that goes back to the 1990s, that taught Hatziel Flores what he was capable of and sent him out into the world to do murals in other places, and that keeps pulling him back.
The figure in the mural is a fan. The confetti is falling. The evening is settling. The biggest fútbol tournament on earth is coming to Dallas this summer, and not everyone who loves the game will get a ticket. Flores thought about that. He painted something for them.
“Once it’s out there, it no longer belongs to me,” he says. “It belongs to the people. They get to decide if it’s good or not.”
